


The Ballad of Red Mattie

by Umbralpilot



Category: World of Warcraft
Genre: (that's a tag now), Established Relationship, Identity Issues, Introspective Flynn Fairwind, M/M, Undercover
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-05
Updated: 2019-11-05
Packaged: 2021-01-23 20:50:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,393
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21326482
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Umbralpilot/pseuds/Umbralpilot
Summary: Shaw is 1. undercover and 2. shirtless.Flynn is... coping.
Relationships: Flynn Fairwind/Mathias Shaw
Comments: 18
Kudos: 95





	The Ballad of Red Mattie

**Author's Note:**

  * For [liodain](https://archiveofourown.org/users/liodain/gifts).

> Anyway I haven't played five minutes of WoW in my life but someone had to do the Shaw sails with Flynn thing. Take up the rest with liodain, who is to blame for everything ever (💕).

It’s a lovely morning on the water, and Shaw is climbing the rigging with a rope-cutting knife in his mouth.

Flynn has a lot of feelings about that, if he’s being totally honest with himself. He’s coping with most of them, even accounting for Shaw being shirtless, pretty well. About as well as can be expected. A lot of it is through sticking to the relative safety of being flabbergasted at how it’s happening in broad daylight, sneaky shadow Spymaster Shaw up there in the bright and windswept heights. Probably visible for nautical miles to anyone on the same mirror-blue sea where Flynn’s ship has been becalmed most the day. His red hair alone is like a beacon of sunlight; he’s put something in it to speed the weather bleaching along, so that two weeks into the journey the copper’s already gone to gentler, almost golden topaz (Flynn’s coping with that, too.) But it’s hard to say that anyone would know him, between that and the way his moustache has transmogrified into a shaggy beard, the warm tan he’s managed by some arcane magic to get under all his freckles. The way he moves on the lines, fluid and easy. That’s the undercover thing, he’s told Flynn. It goes to the joinings between the bones. They could see him for miles and they’d never _ see _him.

Except Flynn. Flynn knows him anywhere, or so he likes to fancy. A compass needle’s magnet doesn’t care which way _ looks _ like true north.

He likes to believe so, anyway. Tilting back until the sun’s in his face putting a cutting aura to everything, he’s a bit discomfited, someway, by how actually good Shaw is at this. With all the cracks about lubberly mainlanders, it’s easy to forget that Stormwind is as much a port city as Boralus. Bigger. Shaw’s told him that, too, when his first objection had been that it wasn’t going to be a great cover if Shaw got brained by a swinging boom fifteen minutes out of port. _ I know how to secure a boom, Captain, _ he’d said, and Flynn said that he really didn’t doubt his proficiency with tying excitable things up at this point but sailing was an art, look here, and Shaw had said, _Espionage_ _is a thousand arts. _

He’d sounded almost _ pleased _with himself. And Flynn had thought that was absolutely just like him, until he'd looked up and seen him shimmy up the ropes for the first time. Tried to convince himself that that was Shaw’s roofwalking skills bolstered by the fact of being Spymaster Shaw and categorically incapable of falling on his face (that being much more a Flynn thing.) But it’s been two weeks. And, well, Flynn’s kept looking.

There’s a lot to look at. Shaw moves like foxfire up between the spars. His wiry arms flex with incredible strength for his slight frame. A trickle of sweat curves down between his shoulder blades, beads along his spine like seamist on the ropes at dawn. Tides, Flynn thinks, watching him pop the knife back between his teeth for some knotwork, he’s something else. And another part, a frankly obnoxious one interrupting a perfectly grand bit of mediation on the Boralus-style low cut of Shaw’s trousers, thinks: _ Who is he, anyway? Who is he really? _

It’s not what he’s signed up for. He shifts where he stands in the hope that some nice friction between the thighs would get his blood where it belongs, away from his brain. It’s the undercover thing. Flynn’s not built for that. He’s just who he is, and that isn’t much maybe but he knows it so he can live with it. Whatever it is Shaw’s doing - well. It’s going to be a long trip.

Endurance has its little rewards, though. Another of Flynn’s crew is balancing on the topmast, and she catches sight of him down below and Shaw up above and calls out, “Hey, Mattie!”

Shaw looks over to her. Sure, the fact that he doesn’t immediately bristle like fifteen angry cats might be weird enough to make Flynn feel like the deck under his feet is swaying in a thunderstorm, but he’s also tucking these moments away in the back of his mind like a stock of munitions. Every _ Mattie _ , his private little Azerite run. _ Pull the other one, mate _ , he’d told Shaw when introduced to Red Mattie, privateer out of Valgarde; and Shaw had said, _ Refuge in audacity _.

Flynn had been this side of calling him full of shit before Shaw leaned in, nicked and drained his flask is one smooth movement, and elaborated in a bizzare northern accent about getting the nickname from a crew that found their shipmate’s resemblance to the infamous Alliance spymaster hilarious (and occasionally lucrative, of course.) After that, Flynn was sold. And also a bit turned on, but that's been getting to be the default even before Shaw had swapped his SI:7 leather for loose trousers and a shirt only when necessary (not often) and started presenting Flynn with fascinating new angles of himself from the captain’s place down by the wheel.

Flynn’s crew member, up above, jerks a thumb down at him. “Captain’s checking you out again,” she says with a snort.

Those sunlit green eyes flicker downward. Flynn can just imagine what Shaw would’ve said to that; Red Mattie, though, he gets this grin in his salt-sprayed beard. Starts shimmying down along the shrouds, quick as a spark up a gunpowder trail. Shaw’s not much in the hips department, but Red Mattie makes it work. The undercover thing. Flynn swallows thickly, for all that his crewmember is still watching. Shaw does always say that he’ll never make a good covert agent.

And now Red Mattie’s coming up to him, real nice and close. Flynn maybe isn’t coping with the shirtless thing as well as he’d like. Red Mattie puts a palm flat against his left pectoral. Up above, the sailor’s gone back to work with a cackle. 

“Still with me, Captain?” Shaw murmurs in his own voice.

Flynn swallows again. It’s a long two weeks since he’s heard Shaw’s voice ring of Stormwind, and the way that accent barely softens a flash of will, a well of control deeper than the ocean they float on. It would've been nice if hearing Shaw’s voice, his real voice, went like lightning just into his dick. But it goes further. He thinks he hears a kind of echo in it - an echo from the walls behind which Mathias Shaw is folded up and put away, tight, tight, behind Red Mattie. Weird that there’s an echo. Can’t really be much room to breathe back there.

He gives a nod, just one. And it’s enough. Shaw’s fingers curl in the fabric of his shirt. His eyes brighten at him through Red Mattie’s leering grin.

“Rumours is, Cap’n,” Red Mattie drawls, “I remind you of a friend.”

Wait, is he doing this? The crewmember is glancing down from the mast again. Flynn’s brain goes for a loop and manages to come back around in less than a month, somehow. He gathers up every ounce of the ability for covert ops he absolutely doesn’t have, and gives a very fluent, “Er.”

“Bit more than a friend, maybe?” the man with the strong, calloused heel of his hand right over his left nipple continues just as cheerfully. “You ever fly that colour, Fairwind? Fire that cannon? Rest of him as tight as that fancy armour look? Curious minds...” 

Flynn has no idea what’s the right, covertness-approved response is here. He’s just who he is, though, so he’s gonna go with that. 

“Might be I did,” he says with a grin of his own. “Wonder how you measure up?”

“Might be I do,” Red Mattie says, and leans close; and then Shaw rasps in his ear, “Might be I can show you a thing or two he never could.”

Flynn’s brain skips the next loop and goes straight into a cartwheel. He thinks he’s parsed the voices, the accents (the undercover thing) right, but maybe it doesn’t matter. It occurs to him that Shaw’s gathering his own little grace notes of the experience. Opportunities for the exceptional as provided by circumstance. 

It’s just like him, if Flynn knows him at all.

Flynn decides he’s going to believe that.

**Author's Note:**

> Me: I miss writing comedy, Fairshaw would work nicely  
Also me: but what if weird identity angst


End file.
